Bob Dylan is now a literary celebrity. And next week, the Booker Prize judges will anoint another. The tag is still chiefly attached to men but women authors shouldn't despair: fame and good writing can be uneasy bedfellows.

Dylan is a musician, who has been well recognised in his field.
Simon Murphy/FlickrOktober 14, 2016

If a society should be judged by the way it treats its children, and those who are struggling on the margins, then Laguna’s work once again proves that the novel is a crucial means for drawing attention to the burning problems of our times.

Helen Macdonald, winner of the 2014 Costa Book of the Year.
Marzena PogorzalyJanuari 28, 2015

Whatever your opinion of book prizes, they remain a useful tool for understanding what is popular in the literary world. The Costa Book of the Year, awarded this year to Helen Macdonald for her book H…

This year the UK’s biggest poetry award, the TS Eliot prize, has gone to David Harsent for his 11th collection, Fire Songs. He joins a sequence of prestigious poets such as Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott and…

Sexual intercourse is getting on a bit. Not only has it been boosting the human population since we emerged from the primordial swamp, it’s more than half a century since Philip Larkin noted its arrival…

Odds were on for Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o winning the Nobel Prize this year.
University of California/Ho/EPANovember 27, 2014

There is a surfeit of book prizes. Big ones, small ones, ones that award experimental fiction, others that concentrate on female authors, or young authors, or authors from Ireland or Latin America. African…

National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson speaks to a group of young readers.
Tulsa City-County Library/FlickrNovember 25, 2014

In his 2005 book The Economy of Prestige, James F. English influentially argued that prizes thrive on scandal. Just last week, scholar Kathleen Horning claimed this year’s National Book Awards could change…

Ali Smith with her second book prize of the week.
Ben QueenboroughNovember 13, 2014

Ali Smith has won the second ever Goldsmiths Prize for boldly original fiction for How To Be Both. There are two narrative sections to the book – and two versions of the actual novel. Which one you read…

This year’s run-up to the naming of the Man Booker Prize winner has just begun, with the announcement of the 13 novels that make up the longlist. They will soon be dissected and analysed by readers and…

A 34-year-old British-born writer has won Australia’s most prestigious literary prize. Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing was named as the unexpected winner of the 2014 Miles Franklin Award tonight. The…

The winners of the enormously respected Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, and of the 21 award categories for journalism and the arts, three caught my eye in particular. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch won…